


rivers 'til I reach you

by strikinglight



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Chance Meetings, F/M, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, University, oikawa makes the world's most extra cameo appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-03 23:28:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14007186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: The first time she finds him is on a Wednesday in April. It’s after the entrance ceremony, and he’s spacing out on the walk back to his apartment, on the bridge over the Hirosegawa. He can’t remember her name, but she remembers his.Or: Iwaizumi, Shimizu, long, quiet walks, and what it means to be at home wherever you go.





	rivers 'til I reach you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [charcoalsuns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalsuns/gifts).



> Just write a drabble, she said. It'll take you no time at all, she said.
> 
> The title for this is from "Rivers and Roads" by the Head and the Heart, which is very much a fitting Song, but the true Song for this fic is ["Time" by Canyon City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umi06l6QB3E), which you'll see in the epigraph.
> 
> This one's for Cam, who (re)ignited the warmest, brightest glow of fondness in me for these two steady souls. Thank you for the umbrellas. Thank you, too, to Ny, for the flower shop.

_Like the moonlit late planes, let the questions just hang.  
All I need is time with you, love._

\- Canyon City, “Time”

 

**1.**

 

The first time she finds him is on a Wednesday in April. It’s after the entrance ceremony, and he’s spacing out on the walk back to his apartment, on the bridge over the Hirosegawa. He can’t remember her name, but she remembers his.

“Iwaizumi-san?”

To hear his own name in a city full of strangers is disarming, to say the least. So, too, is the act of turning from the water and seeing her at once familiar and not.

The guys on the team had called her _pretty,_ and he supposes she is that. Graceful, with her straight hair and her long, fine-boned fingers. Pretty, the same way water is wet. More than that, there’s a serenity to the way she holds herself, even here; some sense of being at home wherever she goes.

 _Like the river,_ Hajime thinks. _Like the river._

“Karasuno’s manager-san?” He fumbles the words on their way out. They’re not her name, and he regrets that immediately. “I’m sorry, I’m not great with names.”

This is only partially true. He’s as good with them as anyone when he’s paying attention—as he now so sharply wishes he had been, all those months ago now.

“Shimizu.” She inclines her head in a little bow, as though to say she doesn’t mind. “Are you headed home?”

It’s an innocuous sort of question, the kind you ask out of politeness even as you recognize that the answer doesn’t matter to you one way or another. From anybody else it’d just sound like empty small talk, but Hajime finds she is too present in this moment for that, in her quiet way; one hand loose around her bag strap, eyes on his face.

“Yeah, in a bit. You?”

Shimizu nods, shifting the strap upward so that it sits higher on her shoulder. When she smiles, Hajime thinks that is like the river too. “Be careful on your way.”

It’s only as he watches her go that he realizes he has questions. _How are you these days? Where are you studying?_ What _are you studying?_ They don’t mean anything, and yet they do. He knows he’ll pass this way again.

The stone of the barricade along the sides of the bridge is still under his hand, and warm in the softening day. Underfoot, he hears the water meandering on along its own steady course.

 

* * *

 

**2.**

 

The next time he sees her is in May, just ahead of him in line at the campus café. He’s getting dinner after practice. She, he’ll soon find out, is out studying late.

The recognition doesn’t kick in until they’re waiting side by side at the pick-up counter. He tells himself it’s because she’s changed her hair, pulled it now into a braid over one shoulder, loose strands escaping where it’s gradually come unraveled over the course of the day. He knows it’s really because he hasn’t, once again, been paying attention.

“Are you all right?” she asks, right on the heels of his hello. “You’re favoring your left leg.”

“It was a bad landing.” Hajime grimaces. She’s looking at him like she can tell what he means—that practice is difficult, that it asks him to push his body ever further, ever faster than even he is used to, and he’s been at this a long time—but it’s perhaps enough that she knows that without him having to say it. “I just need to rest it.”

Shimizu nods, offers in response a noncommittal sort of _hmm._ Then she’s dropping her head and digging around inside her bag. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpses a pencil case, a notebook with a mint-green cover, and he averts his eyes politely. A few seconds later she comes back up with a Salonpas patch, which she proceeds to offer with all the perfunctory briskness of someone who’s done this a hundred times, and Hajime can do nothing but accept it, bemused.

“Do you keep these on you all the time?”

“Force of habit,” she says. “I hope it helps.”

Over his shoulder their coffee arrives, two cups on a tray and the sandwich he’d ordered to go besides. He figures it’s the least he can do to carry it all for her to the empty table by the window, set it down for her as she arranges her things.

“I’m sure it will.” He eyes up her setup— _General Psychology,_ the mint-green notebook, an assortment of pastel highlighters—and recognizes this as his cue to depart. “Well, then. Best of luck with your studying.”

“Thank you, Iwaizumi-san. Take care on your way home.”

Her hand is already on the textbook cover, but her gaze settles on his face and remains there without moving—not searching, not demanding anything, only watching and perhaps waiting. Hajime feels it follow him to the door, and out into the street, and around the corner, all the way to the spot at which the river meets the road.

 

* * *

 

**3.**

 

The June rains come. Of course they just have to come after last period, when he needs to get to practice, on a day that he’s forgotten his umbrella. Hajime’s never been a big believer in intelligent design, but some things are simply too convenient not to laugh at.

When she appears, it’s not out of the blue. It is instead rather like she’s always been there, moving about her own business in the background of everybody else’s life, and Hajime cannot quite trace the line between being unaware of her presence and being, all too soon, vividly aware. Her hair is braided over her shoulder again today. She comes into his peripheral vision from the opposite end of the entranceway, and when he turns his head and catches her eye she lifts her still-folded umbrella (navy, trimmed with red) in silent question.

“I’m headed to practice.” Again it feels as though he’s telling her things she already knows.

“I can walk you there,” she says, and passes him her umbrella when he opens his hand for it. They step out, side by side under its shade.

They don’t say much as they walk together, which is to say they don’t make each other talk. Hajime keeps his eyes forward and watches the length of his stride but Shimizu matches him, step for step, and the pocket of silence they move within is mysterious in a way he is not certain he wants to scrutinize too closely. He doesn’t know how it is they can be quiet together, but asking how that is possible feels like asking the river to explain its course.

They part in front of the gym. He wonders if there might be something more to say, but then she reaches out and touches him on the arm lightly in farewell, and somehow he finds that will be enough for them both for now.

He should really go change. Instead, he watches her round the corner, retracing their path back toward the front gate. It’s only later that he’ll realize; when he moves out from under the eaves overhanging the front door, making his way inward toward the locker room, his breathing is steady. Not stuttering in his chest anywhere near as painfully as it should, as he’s gotten used to it doing on practice days.

A second realization: if she’d meant to go home, he must have taken her so far out of her way.

 

* * *

 

**4.**

 

He doesn’t get to pay her back until July. It takes a deceptively sunny morning, and a sudden downpour. When he steps out of his last class and heads down the stairs to the entranceway Shimizu is there, standing with her arms folded, looking pensively outward.

He knows these coincidences need not mean anything—that they do not, by default, mean something. She is not the only person his path must tangle together with repeatedly through the days, intersecting and overcrossing, one seeing the other, one being seen by the other. But halfway to the doors, Hajime stops. Considers, briefly, that this might be his chance to be intentional about things with her, for once.

“Can I help you get to where you need to be?” He draws up by her side, umbrella already in hand. She tilts her head upward to smile at him and he knows, all at once, how seeing is different from _looking,_ and how much paying attention counts for in the end.

“You don’t have practice today?”

“Not today,” he says. “Coach is down with the flu.” He tries not to sound glad, though he is honest to a fault and something of that must surely creep into his voice—for a slower day, a quieter day, the kind of day he can rest in even as neither of them stop moving forward, always forward.

Shimizu pauses to consider this, then asks, just this shade of uncertain, “I’m over the river. Do you mind?”

 _Never._ “I’m going that way, too.”

It’s raining harder today than it was the first time, hard enough that they have to mind how they go. They stand close together, walk each other around puddles. Once Hajime puts out his hand to steady her across a stretch of uneven pavement, cautious and gentle at her elbow, breaking contact again when the ground is sure. The rest of the way part of him is thinking, and thinking, and thinking; about the precise point of contact where the edge of her shoulder brushes his upper arm, about how strange it is that they’ve been heading the same way all this time.

 

* * *

 

 **5.**  

 

There’s an aging tofu shop in his hometown Hajime’s mother likes to buy from, because she’s convinced they carry better stock than the chain supermarkets that infest the inner city. That’s where he is on his second day back over the August holidays—stepping through the door on an errand for half a kilogram of silken tofu and finding her contemplating the shelves.

“Good afternoon,” he says, and he can’t help the little swell of pride he feels at how he’s managed to sound so completely unsurprised.

“Good afternoon.” She doesn’t miss a beat, even if he can see the ways the summer heat has done a number on her skin, making her flush high in the cheeks and down the back of her neck. “Do you know much about tofu, Iwaizumi-san?”

Hajime knows a few things about tofu. Mostly it’s that it’s healthy and that his parents are fond of it, and a little bit about which kinds to choose, and while he would never have thought that knowledge would serve any real purpose before this moment, he’s undeniably glad to have it at hand now.

“Depends how you want to use it. If you’re going to eat it by itself, you should probably go with _kinu. Momen_ is good for cooking—it absorbs flavors well and holds up nicely when it’s fried.”

Shimizu nods, attentive. “Do you cook with it often?”

There’s a handful of recipes, as it happens, floating at the back of his mind, but those are hard to rattle off. He decides instead to save them, maybe for another time. “Mostly I like making _ganmodoki.”_

It’s easy from there. They buy their tofu—half a kilogram each, _momen_ for her and _kinu_ for him—and go out onto the street together to stand a moment at the corner, lingering in the late afternoon light. Hajime’s uncertain which of them decided this and which of them chose to follow suit, to stay instead of go, but maybe it’s not so simple at that. Maybe it doesn’t matter which is which if they’re both here now.

“Have you been home long?”

“I got in just yesterday,” he says, and, by way of explanation, “Training camp.”

Her expression softens. “Training camp.”

They both know high school is not so far away as to deserve nostalgia, softening and blurring until all the sharp edges of their memories are gone and all that remains is the warmth. Not yet. But it _is_ possibly far enough that they can feel the difference, the dislodging, the strange sense of being between different heres and elsewheres. Finding a place to belong takes time. Uprooting from that place, if the circumstances demand it, can take none at all. Pick up and start again.

“Do you miss it?” He’s not sure what exactly _it_ refers to, besides _everything._ Everything they used to be.

Shimizu likely understands, from the way she doesn’t hesitate as she says, “Sometimes.” He supposes that’s the end of it—certainly he wouldn’t think to ask her to say more—so he’s surprised when she adds, with a little smile that’s warm and just a bit wry, like she’s telling him a secret, “It’s mostly my friends that I miss.”

 _Friends, huh._ He has no doubt everyone on her team would have been more than willing to die for her, however improbable a scenario that might have been. He knows the feeling, recognizes that he would have, too, for any of his boys. And more than anything, it’s the fierceness of that feeling he can still remember, the invincible certainty of being in the right place—like all they’d ever need was each other, like they were going to be young forever.

Not that he’s all that much older, of course, but things are different now. There’s no need to be so hyperbolic.

“Me too,” he admits. It’s easier than he thought it would be, just a second ago. He doesn’t say the next thought: _It’s not so bad lately, though._

He’s looking at her, so he sees it when her eyes warm. Another thing he notices, after all these coincidences: they don’t often talk, but she always looks him in the eye when they do. It’s never the belligerent sort of eye contact, the kind that demands or probes or challenges; it only ever tells him, _I am giving you my full attention_.

She looks about to say more, seems to remember suddenly the weight of the plastic bag around her wrist. Smiles again, soft and apologetic. “I should get home; we need this for dinner. I’ll see you around, Iwaizumi-san.”

 _God, I hope so,_ Hajime thinks. He has just enough presence of mind left—or, to look at it another way, not enough courage—so he doesn’t say it aloud. “Take care, Shimizu.”

 

* * *

 

**6.**

 

“Just _ask the girl out,_ Iwa-chan,” Oikawa tells him. “Get her flowers or something, like normal people do.”

September blows into Hajime’s apartment through the open window, all cold wind and fluttering leaves. The room is full of Oikawa’s voice. Suddenly, it’s like he never left home, and his best friend is almost real in ways that he has not been in months, sprawled on his stomach on the _tatami_ , leaning languid and loose-limbed and utterly at ease at Hajime’s dining table.

Hearing him talk like this, it’s almost possible to forget that Oikawa is an image on Hajime’s computer screen, the rest of him thoroughly embroiled in another life cities away.

“I don’t know anything about flowers,” Hajime says. “I’m not sure she’s a flowers kind of girl.”

The lift of Oikawa’s eyebrow is almost a sound, an audible upward lilt through the static. “So, tofu, then? It got you this far.”

He’s a beat away from replying with something rude when his phone lights up with a text on the floor. Something incidental from Shimizu— _I made_ ganmodoki _today, thank you for the recipe_ —and he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is an idiot for smiling at it as helplessly as he does in this moment, in front of Oikawa, but he can’t help it.

“Look at you!” Oikawa scoffs, from Tokyo. He sounds almost fond. “I wonder if you even know how soft you’ve gotten.”

“Shut up.” It’s halfhearted and they both know it.

 _“Shut up,_ he says, but what a smile!”

Hajime pauses momentarily to contemplate his answer, hits a wall when his next thought, the wish that opens up inside of him, is anything but incidental. One thing that’s becoming increasingly hard to hide, even as saying it continues to be impossible: _I’d like to spend more time with you_. Another way of looking at this thing: _Why do I feel like you know me?_  

 _nice  
_ _howd u like it?_

Easiest always to ask the simplest questions first. In a second, there is the light again, and the notification alert like a little bell.

_It was very good._

 

* * *

 

**7.**

 

Hajime doesn’t stop thinking about flowers. It’s not until sometime in October, though, that he actually stops to look at them—a Sunday afternoon, outside a flower shop near the train station he must have passed innumerable times by now on his way to school.

On the one hand, he’s not entirely stupid about flowers. He knows what roses are, and chrysanthemums and daisies. He knows most people think they’re pretty and is fairly certain he does too, even if it’s only a distanced, removed, unfamiliar prettiness, the sort of beauty he can acknowledge without feeling one way or another about. On the other hand, he’s read up a little bit on how different flowers can easily stand for thousands of different things—how you can apparently use combinations of them to say anything from _you are so lovely_ to _you have disappointed me—_ and the intricacies of such a language are so alien to him he has no idea where he’d even start with it.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing there by the time he sees Shimizu reflected in the shop window. He _does_ know, however, with all the force of a lightning bolt, what an idiot he is for not going somewhere further away, risk of getting lost on the other side of Sendai be damned.

“Good morning.” The greeting is practically a reflex now, practically muscle memory, which he supposes is good in that it comes out of him sounding like the most natural thing in the world, even as his vision tunnels and his heart begins to hammer, bracing for a fight.

“Good morning.” Shimizu’s eyes crinkle up when she smiles; he sees it all clearly, too clearly, even in the glass. “Are you window-shopping?”

 _Just passing by._ “I need a bouquet to take to my aunt at the hospital.” He doesn’t know where the lie comes from. Immediately he wants to kick himself in the shins—both shins—but his mouth just keeps going. At the very least, his next statement is a clean truth. “But I don’t know anything about flowers.”

Hajime’s still not much for intelligent design, but _something_ must hear his desperate prayer for her not to ask anything further about his hypothetical aunt, though in hindsight he imagines it’ll be poor recompense for the line of conversation she chooses to pursue instead.

“I know a little. I could help you, if you like?”

 _No, it’s fine. I don’t want to keep you. I’m sure I can ask the florist for—_ “That’d be a lifesaver, thanks.”

_Goddammit._

What little shreds of good sense he has left go into opening the door for her so she can step into the shop ahead of him. There’s a bell over the door that chimes when she enters. He follows close behind her, trying his hardest not to die. And all the while there are too many things he can’t help noticing. The way her steps slow down in here, among the flowers. The white glare from the overhead bulbs on her glasses. Her hands, gentle and fluttering as she talks to herself.

“You don’t want anything too heavily scented, so better to skip the lilies, and the freesia here… Some gerbera daisies, maybe, and some white carnations… Those will brighten up a room nicely.”

He doesn’t miss the way her voice changes when she talks however briefly of white carnations, the way it softens as voices do when you say the name of someone you’re fond of. That’s yet another entry in his list of little noticings. He wants to think about it more, but she doesn’t give him time; she’s already turning to him again, already asking him questions of her own.

“What do you think?”                                                                       

“That’s perfect,” he says, and for the record he means it.

His next possibly ill-considered decision rolls around just ten minutes later, back on the sidewalk outside the shop with a pretty bouquet in his hands that is so much more her good idea than his. He means only to tell her thank you, and then after that possibly goodbye. What he does instead is reach past the folded, crinkling paper, pull out one carnation—carefully, carefully, so as not to disturb the arrangement—and offer it to her.

“I owe you one,” he says, though from the way he angles his head he may as well be speaking to her shoes. “And you like these, right?”

Shimizu blushes, then, all the way down to her neck—he remembers bumping into her over the summer, how her skin had looked in the sun—and for a second he’s worried she’ll refuse, but she takes it in the end. “Thank you, that’s very sweet.”

An incongruous word. Hajime wonders if another person has called him sweet, ever, in his life. His mother, maybe. Or Oikawa, mocking. But he’ll take it if it comes from her. “I should get to the hospital. You have a good day.”

“You, too.” She nods her head, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I hope your aunt gets well soon.”

Needless to say, Hajime does not go to the hospital. He goes home—that is, back to his apartment—and dumps the rest of the flowers in a pitcher because he doesn’t have a vase, and steels himself to be laughed at all the way into next year, the next time Oikawa calls.

 

* * *

 

**8.**

 

She comes to watch him practice, one Wednesday in November, and even he has to admit this cannot possibly be accidental.

He’s never confessed this out loud to anyone, but practicing in the university gymnasium sets his teeth on edge. Everything is larger and louder here, and every day a handful of people will trickle into the stands to cheer or watch or simply sit, and even if he should be more than used to playing before an audience, practice is different. It’s a bit like guests showing up at your house unannounced when you’re half-dressed and haven’t brushed your teeth.

He’s gearing up for serve practice when he sees Shimizu, alone in a lower-middle row, one leg crossed over the other and leaning her cheek against her hand and watching. _Really_ watching, with all the attention of someone who knows what she’s looking at.

Hers is the only familiar face in the stands. He doesn’t know, just yet, if that makes the roiling in the pit of his stomach better or worse. Part of him considers calling out to her and lifting his arm to wave—his teammates do it often enough, when there’s a friend or a girlfriend or a boyfriend around—but ultimately he decides against it. He’s still figuring out how he fits into this team and he’s got to keep himself steady, and mostly he’s not ready to let them tease him yet. (And how they _will_ tease, he knows, even if he insists it’s nothing.)

She watches all two hours. Later he finds her outside in the darkening evening, nursing a can of coffee by the vending machine behind the gym. She gets one for him, too, before he can ask, because it’s cold out and his breath puffs out sharply in little gusts when he says her name.

“I owe you one, this time,” she explains.

The carnation he gave her a month ago is long dead by now, but it’s nice that she remembers. The thought alone is enough to warm him, even as the wind picks up and sighs past them, pulling at the ends of his jacket, stirring her hair.

“It’s tough out here, Shimizu,” he says, apropos of nothing. Maybe it’s the warmth of the coffee can over the still-raw burn in the center of his palm. Maybe it’s knowing that she saw him miss the toss, not once but twice. Saw him duck his head down in apology in the direction of his setter: _Sorry,_ _senpai_. _Sorry. I’ll aim higher next time_.

“It really is,” Shimizu agrees. “But you keep up well.”

“Really? That’s nice of you.” He sighs, exhales hard through his nose. It’s not cold enough to turn the air white, but soon. “I’ve got to do more than keep up, though.”

“And you will, I’m sure. Give yourself some time.”

If it were anyone else he’d think they were saying it to appease him, but from her it’s less a token expression of sympathy than a clean fact, straightforwardly delivered. The candor of it makes it easy, somehow, to trust in anything else that she might say. Sometimes keeping up is all you can manage. If she were ever to tell him there was no shame in that, he might even believe.

They finish their drinks; he holds out his hand for her can so he can crumple it up in his fist to dispel the last of the energy, tosses both into the trash one after the other. She smiles at the arcs they make in the air, and that gives him enough of his courage back to say what he’s been thinking.

“Can I walk you home?”

 

* * *

 

**9.**

 

They’re standing outside her apartment when he finally says something close to what he’s _really_ been thinking. It’s a month and however many walks later—December, with its long early nights, the air gone so sharp Hajime has to tuck his scarf up around his face.

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

She’s standing just outside the door with the key already in her hand, except she hasn’t put it in the lock yet, and he’s standing a little too close even if he’s not sure how he got there. He realizes that at this distance he could probably count her eyelashes if he wanted to, behind her glasses, which means he should probably take a step back—only he doesn’t step back, and neither does she.

There shouldn’t have been much else to say, here. He vaguely remembers that before this they had already said goodbye. There’s no way he can explain how his memory of that goodbye, two minutes old at most, is already faded and fuzzy-edged, as though it happened to someone else.

“Tomorrow…?”

“I mean, not by accident,” he says. One of his hands comes up to scrub at the back of his neck, mostly because he can feel it prickling even under the scarf, but also because he’s completely at a loss now as to what to do with his hands, and also with the rest of him, for that matter. The words still don’t come out quite right, are still not quite what he wants to say, but this time he can’t bring himself to regret. “And… for longer than this.”

What he means is he doesn’t know how to ask her for more time. What he means is, _Can you breathe easily with me, too?_ Part of him still shies from saying it in so many words, in case it’s not true, in case her answer is no, but it doesn’t do anything for the other part that has not stopped whispering, _Maybe, maybe—_

“I was waiting for a chance to ask you properly,” he continues when she doesn’t answer—or maybe he’s babbling so that he doesn’t have to _hear_ her answer, especially if that answer is the kind that will make things hard for them both—except he’s begun to do that thing where he’s talking to her shoes again, and he can’t see her face at all now because the corners of his vision are going dark, even with the overhead light like a beacon above them. “If I’ve bungled it, though, you can tell me.”

It’s not that this—whatever they have now, it’s not that it isn’t enough. He’s nothing but lucky to know her this way, her path and his mapping out the bends and curves of the same city. The trouble is that Hajime’s never set much store by luck, and so he can’t believe now that luck is all there is, or was, or can be.

“You can look me in the eyes properly, too, Iwaizumi-san.”

These are the things he knows about Shimizu Kiyoko. She’s good with names and first-aid and flowers. She takes long steps when she walks, studies psychology, highlights her books in pastel purple and green. Back in high school, she managed a rival volleyball team. It’s a year later and now she is here and so is he, and he cannot forget how, on the bridge over the river back in the spring, months ago when Sendai was only a city full of strangers, Shimizu Kiyoko had remembered his name.

Surely, Hajime thinks, surely all of this must count for something.

“I have time now, and some tea from home.” There’s a laugh in her voice. When he lifts his head he finds she is smiling, familiar and beautiful. “Do you want to come inside?”

 

* * *

 

**10.**

 

January fourth marks the end of winter break. On the bridge over the Hirosegawa, he waits for her.

“Iwaizumi-san?”

His name on her lips is a white cloud in the air, and then she is beside him. She is in every part of the city he knows now—every street corner, every bend in the road, and the river, always the river, staying the course.

“Ah, there you are,” he says over the sound of the water.

“Here I am,” she agrees, and takes his hand.


End file.
